How to render a normal map from a camera+mesh?
Blender 2.8


Properties -> Render Properties -> Render Engine = Workbench
Properties -> Render Properties -> Lighting = MatCap
Properties -> Render Properties -> Studio Light = check_normal+y.xer
Properties -> Render Properties -> Color Management -> View Transform = Standard


I also recommend:

setting the scene background to #8080ff aka RGB(0.5, 0.5, 1.0) aka HSV(0.666, 0.265, 1.0), camera to orthographic, and output to a power-of-two square render.

Note: Blender shows a "Gamma Corrected" footnote on Hex numbers and gives me this strange value: #BCBCFF instead of the expected #7f7fff or ~#8080ff, I recommend using the RGB input


Properties -> Scene -> World -> Viewport Display -> Color = RGB(0.5, 0.5, 1.0)
Active Camera -> Properties -> Camera -> Lens -> Type = Orthographic
Properties -> Output Properties -> Dimensions -> Resolution X = 1024
Properties -> Output Properties -> Dimensions -> Resolution Y = 1024


Render as usual, be sure to inspect your output closely! color management is quite fickle especially since we're not representing color data





You can compare your render to a public example normal map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping#/media/File:Normal_map_example_with_scene_and_result.png